Since the question came up in Pms:
Knights, Magi and Hounds need to be either created with acts or be empowered with acts before being used. You may also discard cards useless to you (or rather that you deem useless), these will be randomly redistributed among players.
EDIT:
Okay lots of things popping up at once. Again to the Knights Magi and Hounds: You spend an act to create for example a dragon. Now Hounds are created in Batches of seven so that card falls away and Magi need to be able to be concealed, that is conceal their appearance and /or power...so that falls away too, unless you give that dragon magic to shapeshift and so on and so forth.
But for arguments sake, lets say as God of War you put that created Dragon down as your Knight of War. Thus The Card of Knight of War is now occupied by said dragon. If you or anyone plays the Knight of War, the Dragon comes into play in a gambit.
In other words, upon creation you can put down that said creature you just created is part of your House and fills a position therein. Otherwise it is just a normal creature without any stake in your Gambits. It could however become an unbound card in a gambit by virtue of Obelisk being played on it for example or it could become part of another House if someone an entice it to become part of its House.
Now with that resolved on towards your struggles. What Phanalin and Ralkiesis are doing is basically breaking down into a Gambit. Once tries to claim the glory of all the Gods while the other tries to prevent such a thing, beginning with next turn a Gambit will begin between the House of Shadows and the one of Truth.
Similiarly another Gambit will begin between Truth and Making due to Our God of Crafting trying to prevent the Tutelspera from interfering with its worlds.
Now interestingly those two Gambits run on completely different levels. The First one is one for the belief of the people and Low Level Cards make sense to be played here to subtly influence the populace, similiarly in the second Contest its all about the Direct Strength of the Gods and playing a Mason or a Weaver will not really get you anywhere.